Happy 10th birthday Evidence & Policy journal!

Our Evidence and Policy journal is celebrating ten years. To mark the occasion we asked Evidence & Policy journal editor Annette Boaz to trace the history of the journal’s development and give us a sneak preview of the birthday based activities coming up…

Annette Boaz, Evidence & Policy journal editor

It seems like only yesterday that we sat around a table in the ESRC Centre for Evidence Based Policy at Queen Mary University discussing with Ali Shaw from Policy Press how great it would be if there was a home for those who wanted to write and read about the relationship between evidence, policy and practice.

Ali and Ken Young, the Centre Director, share a gift for making things happen and before I knew it we were looking at cover designs and receiving copy for a brand new journal!

From the start the aim was to be more than an academic journal. The practice section was designed to provide space for those engaged in the practice of promoting research use. Whereas the research and debate sections immediately attracted attention, it took a while to get the practice section going but it has definitely proved worth the effort. The popular Sources and Resources section has always offered an open access digest of new papers, books and reports and includes short articles on relevant conferences, events and initiatives.

Stellar achievements

The first few years of a journal are hard work. I remember standing on a platform at a Scandinavian conference with the Editor of the Psychological Bulletin. He listed the stellar achievements of his journal and the holy grail that was getting something published in one of its volumes! I remember thinking we had all that distance to travel as well as our additional ambitions to reach out to policy and practice audiences and contributors.

That we achieved an ISI impact rating at our first application was therefore a great moment; we are however just as proud of the thriving practice section. The current impact factor is 1.222 and it is ranked 18 out of 92 journals in Social Sciences interdisciplinary.

What makes a journal work is the people who engage with it:, the contributors, the reviewers, the editorial team and the advisory board. As the contributions have increased, David Gough and I have been very grateful to our Associate Editors who continue to offer the diverse expertise needed to handle the multi-disciplinary, contributions that address the challenges of evidence and policy in different countries and contexts.

“What makes a journal work is the people who engage with it…”

Holding it all together is our Editorial Officer, Sylvia Potter. Last, but definitely not least, from the start we have had fantastic support from Sandra Nutley who will sadly be stepping down this year. I would like to thank her for her contribution – as critical to the first ten years of the journal as to the field more widely.

We have lots of plans to celebrate our tenth birthday starting with getting you to help us put together a top ten highlights from Evidence & Policy that will be open access for the year. Please do vote for your favourite papers via Twitter (@EvidencePolicy) or via e-mail (pp-marketing@bristol.ac.uk).

With the support of the family of Carol Weiss, who sadly died, we plan to launch a new prize to be awarded for the best paper by an early career researcher. We also want to look forward and will bring together leading individuals in the field to help us take the journal forward into the next decade. And, of course, we will be hosting celebratory drinks at at least one conference this year, so please join us if you see the invitation in a conference programme!

Do keep an eye out via email and twitter for all our birthday celebration activities and thank you for all your support and involvement in our first decade….onwards!

More information on the Evidence and Policy Journal is available on our website here. You can read the journal, including the latest ‘most read’ articles, subscribe or make a submission to the journal through the website or sign up for our quarterly newsletter here.